Ask Lemmy

No. I think that things have pretty steadily gotten better over time, and that a great deal of people being upset about now for any given now comes from a tendency to focus on negatives. Could be social media or news media tending to bring negatives to the surface because it drives engagement, political activists aiming to drive or leverage upset, or so forth.

Politics, economics and war are all hard to predict for long term, but just on the count of climate change kids born today are screwed.

Very much so. I honestly think it's at least a little cruel and selfish to have a child in a dying world.

That said, I remain supportive of the parents in my life and I try to keep that feeling to myself--unless the parent brings it up (my cousin has two very young children whom he adores, but he also worries for their futures due to climate change and political instability, and he'll talk pretty openly with me about it).

You are born in the very very very best stretch the human race has ever known.

We have solutions for almost every problem which exists today.

Wars are at an historical low point.

Chances are good you've never been even experienced war first hand.

Housing is expensive, yes. But chances are you're reading this on a couch or bed in a home, heated (or cooled), with a working stove, light at night and a fridge with edibles in it. And lets not talk about your immediate almost unrestricted access to all of human knowledge.

That would be unbelievable, impossible even during 99.9% of human history. (Or somewhere near this figure)

You should stop doomscrolling and start reading the real human history.

All of human knowledge at your fingertips. And this is what you chose to distill from it.

I think we are in for a very hard 30-50 years politically and economically speaking.

Current young people are already poorer than their parents, and that's not getting solved. Next generation will be poorer and we will have to factor in a lot of tensions and unsolved problems that I think will derive in violence, a lot of violence. And very heavy societal collapses.

Maybe I'm dramatic, but the other day I thought that's not unlikely that a "western" country will experience a famine in the next 50 years. Many don't produce enough food for themselves by far, the moment they don't have the money or the possibility to buy it from other countries... Starvation it is. And with a growing population getting near the 10 billion humans, a few years of globally bad crops could devastate humankind.

So, yep, I think kids today are in for really hard times.

Considering that my outlook on the future is grim, I would say that I do, yes.

But on the other hand, when I look at my 3yo nephew and how my sister raises him, teaching him inclusiveness, limiting his exposure to screens as much as possible, and encouraging him to draw and go outdoors, it gives me some hope that maybe not all is lost.

All the time. I fake being happy for the parents and on the inside think What the fuck is wrong with you?

Thirty-ish years ago, my grandfather said he felt sorry for me because of the state of the world.

Human nature is to say things are going to shit, everything is terrible, and things were better in some non-existent past.

Yeah, things suck now. But they also sucked thirty years ago and 100 years ago. The difference is that we know the outcome to (some) of the problems people faced then. And (generally) the worst case scenario didn't happen.

Yeah, we need to fight the rich on climate change. But we will. And we'll mitigate the problems we can. And we'll tell our grandkids that we don't envy their future.

Unclear. Maybe things are going to get better; it's happened before right?

It hasn't been all bad news lately, too. If you're not straight, cis, or from the the West, being a boomer wasn't such a great deal.

I think things will make a turn in about ten years. Yes, climate is very critical, but the kids of today will have a better shot at shaping the world in a time when the last old ideas from the fossil fueled age have finally died.

It's going to get rough, but at least they have a chance of changing it. We never did get a chance, because the boomers were kept alive with improved healthcare. It's the same people who have all the wealth and power today as it was in 1980s.

So maybe Gen-X and millennials will be the next old assholes, but at least they're better educated and their views are much better aligned with younger generations than the old ones. We might finally be able to work together across generations politically in just a few years time. It's much needed, and it's hard work, but I envy the kids who get to be the creators of the post-boomer society.

No. Only joy for the new parents and child. (Though I do put in work to shore up their finances, try to get them my next bonus.)

Several reasons: being a kid today is better than being a kid 20-50 years ago. Toys are cooler, parenting competence and training has broadly improved, minecraft exists, and there is some really good childrens TV.

Health risks are largely down, especially compared to 35 years ago. (Anecdotally about 10% of families around my cohort lost kids. Far fewer in the younger cohorts.)

While economic mobility is down, more people means a stronger voting block. Boomers run the world because their protests changed policy. I see indications that kids are a more competent politic than earlier generations (eg, climate and LGBTQ rights), we just need them to matter sooner.

For what it's worth, the economy is not just bad, it's breaking. If workers remain this exploited, there will soon be nobody to sell to. We are seeing large (usually stupid) interventions to try and address it, I put nontrivial odds on something sane eventually being tried.

War deaths are low and really don't seem likely to increase dramatically (see here).

Edit: I forgot to add LGBTQ rights/acceptance! While there are definitely still places that are not safe, many of them were not safe before (and that was just the status quo), I believe the risks have decreased and will continue to do so, while the medical access has improved (and that hopefully will continue, though I'm personally expecting that to get worse before it gets better. I think kids today probably get good care in 10 years, some kids 6-12 are in for a bad time.)

I'm not trying to doom on anyone's bloom here, but things are getting worse all around. Even if you ignore all of the political and social strife, and all of the war and terror, there's still the warming planet to contend with, and we don't have the magic technology to fix it 20 years ago yet.

As the planet gets warmer, resources will get tighter, people will be displaced, and that will only lead to further strife. Energy crisis, water shortages, famine. They're all guaranteed. We're in the cascade now.

Your future is about surviving now.

All ye who enter abandon all hope

Seriously, you people are a bunch of cake eaters. "The future is scary and things are getting worse." It's always been scary, you've just been privileged enough for it not to be.

All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it.

Bro, people have it bad NOW. Life is and has always been suffering and struggle. Get out of your online bubble and go see some shit. Anyone here who says their life outlook looks bleak would have said the exact same shit 30 years ago or even 100 years ago.

Life is suffering no matter when.

Yes, climate change, microplatics in brains and balls and mountain fresh water and pollution all around.

Oh and forget about ever owning your house except you inherit.

And all of it is man-made.

Honestly, I don't. I came up in the '80s, wasn't diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn't feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.

Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish 'Troubles'. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were 'yesterday' if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.

If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I'm not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the '70s you were your parents' property and didn't develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.

I still wouldn't bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I'm glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.

Born 1949 would be awesome. After world war, then Woodstock, cheap housing, fucked up the world with their plastics, dead before its getting hot. These mfs had the best timespan ever.

Not in the least.

You should look at people born in the past.

Absolutely yes I feel bad for them.

Some people will say that now is the best time to be alive, but I think we have hit our peak and are facing an ugly drop-off. Climate change is a big one, but I think that technology is quickly becoming detrimental to the average person because it is leading to a consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer.

If we dont pass the torch only the rich will. Is that a world we want to fortify? I'd rather not. Someone has to oppose them. Thats our and our children's fight as the world begins to wane.

I choose not to. I can choose to be hopeful for the future without being unrealistic. I can see intrinsic value in human life and the human experience even knowing that every single one of us will die at some point, some peacefully, some during suffering. The moment of death doesn't have to define one's life. Even a baby who lives for six hours has spent infinitely more time living than dying. Would you be so nihilistic as to erase that life, just because it was short?

Your philosophy is valid; it's not necessarily correct.
Starting from the assumption that it is denies you the opportunity to see things from a different perspective.

Everyone here knows the solution; Eat the rich.

Abortions should be legal at any term

As a parent in the US, yes. The future looks very dim among climate change, water overuse, corruption of civic institutions by the capital class, etc.

Even people born 20 years ago have it rough - they’re just now graduating college into a crummy job market and massively inflated housing market, with MAGA policies and AI destroying the economy for both blue and white collar folks as quickly as possible.

It seems cruel to create new life in this environment. Are you going to tell the kids that it’s their job to fix the world that the previous generations abused and degraded for short term gains, because it’s somehow our duty as sane humans to produce more sane humans to continue the fight? Many people today already live a worsening paycheck to paycheck existence, with too little free time to focus on systemic change. How will adding to that help?

Nearly every generation has felt pessimism at one time or another that the world is the worst it’s ever been. But it sure seems different this time.

The folk heroes of tomorrow will be people like Greta Thunberg and Mario’s brother, and that’s not a great existence to root for.